occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

January 09, 2013

work to rule

There’s been a few fascinating, if unverified, insights
thrown up over the past few days about how information management actually
works on a day to day level in China. Here’s how it goes down at Southern Weekend. And
here’s how Sina Weibo’s internet censors interpreted their directives:

With such background, we have the second
thesis: The strategy on deletion and distribution. Please think about this: You
guys keep posting messages like machines, and the micro-blog secretaries keep
deleting them. If we don't delete messages one by one and suspend accounts, we
could have saved more time and energy. We could have served better as the
running dog. You can see the messages before they are deleted, right? You still
have your account functioning, right? You are all experienced
netizens, you know that the technology allows us to delete messages in a
second. Please think carefully on this.

They’re working to rule, with a heavy hint that
the more work they have to do, the harder the rule is to enforce. We’ve blogged
this before.

Ah, right. I thought it might be some kind of jackal metaphor - i.e. capitalism itself is Shere Khan and it is followed around by lots of Tabaquis, muttering "hit him, boss! Yeah! You're the greatest!"

The misconceptions of a Prussian about the French revolution and British economic history, written in order to win arguments against other Germans, implemented out of context by Russians (broadly defined), and used by Chinese people as an operations manual for a superpower.